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Being rejected, he then offered himself to the illegitimate daughter of James II., by the daughter of Sir Charles Sedley. She was as ostentatious as himself, and accepted him. Meantime, the felicities of this translation are at times perfectly astonishing; and it would be scarcely possible to express more nervously or amply the words,
Alphonse Daudet, in a conversation with H. H. Boyesen said, speaking of Tourguenief, "What a luxury it must be to have a great big untrodden barbaric language to wade into! We poor fellows who work in the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing.
When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses, brilliances, profundities, and felicities so prodigally displayed in the Plays, and try to fit them to the historyless Stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home there.
It is in vain to deny that those literatures have lost something of the relative value they once possessed, and which made it a literary necessity to study Greek and Latin for their sakes. The literary necessity is in a measure superseded by translations, which, though they may fail to communicate the aroma and the verbal felicities of the original, reproduce its form and substance. It is furthermore superseded by the rise of new literatures, and by introduction to those of other and elder lands. The Greeks were masters of literary form, but other nations have surpassed them in some particulars. There is but one Iliad, and but one Odyssee; but also there is but one Job, but one Sakoontal
Hendrickson stood, still grasping her hand, and looking down into her pure, tranquil face, with such a rapture pervading his soul, that he seemed as if entering upon the felicities of heaven. "This is even better than my hopes," he said, speaking at length, but in a subdued voice. Jessie opened her eyes, and now gazed at him calmly, but lovingly. What a manly presence was his!
What is perceived solely by feeling, cannot be described, for it does not fall into ideas of thought nor, therefore, into words. For the understanding sees only and sees what is of wisdom or truth, but not what is of love or good. Those felicities are therefore inexpressible, but still they ascend in like degree with wisdom. They are infinitely various, and each is ineffable.
But the superiour ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be able, at last, to tell us we are more than our present selves; and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments."
We looked for the extinction of this national scourge by its own inevitable decays: through its own organization we had hoped that the Repeal Association should be confounded: we trusted that an enthusiasm, founded in ignorance, and which, in no one stage, could be said to have prospered, must finally droop spontaneously, and that once having drooped, through mere defect of actions that bore any meaning, or tendencies that offered any promise, by no felicities of intrigue could it ever be revived.
The old appeal, which fixed attention upon the interest of the individual, has lost its power. It is not possible to stir the average human being of this generation, as the average human being of fifty years ago was stirred, by pictures of the terrors of hell and the felicities of heaven.
And for all his disillusion there were still at her command occasional felicities of manner and strains of feeling ethereally delicate and spiritual, like a stanza from the Christian Year that moved him and pleased his taste as nothing else had power to move and please; steeped, as they were, in a far-off magic of youth and memory.
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